"We can all be thankful" that "after 30 years of taking Christianity hostage and claiming that the church was really the Republican Party at prayer, this election actually revealed that the church is owned by neither Democrats nor Republicans," MSNBC's Martin Bashir pontificated at the open of is "Clear the Air" commentary which closed his eponymous November 9 program.

Fortunately for Mr. Bashir, making straw-man arguments and spouting overheated political rhetoric is not a sin. What is, however, is hypocrisy. You see, Bashir has been fond of using the Bible as a cudgel to attack conservative Republicans for having allegedly unbiblical, even anti-Christian politics. Take his hostile interview with Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) back in May, in which Bashir slandered Barton by saying he was for slashing funding to Meals on Wheels and that cutting back funding to the program was unbiblical:

Bashir wasted no time getting straight to his biased, loaded questions:

We want to recognize your support for Meals on Wheels and your service to the community, but, are you, as Rep. Gwen Moore said on this broadcast yesterday, are you really going to vote with your colleagues in the House to cut food deliveries for the elderly, school lunch subsidies for 280,000 poor children, and vote for 300,000 poor children to lose their health insurance. Are you going to vote for that?

Barton responded that he was committed to voting to "honor our commitment that we made last summer to begin to reduce the gigantic federal deficit." Barton added that he and his wife personally financially support the Meals on Wheels program, and that his wife regularly volunteers for the program.

Bashir, of course, wasn't satisfied with Barton's exercise of personal charity and sought to use the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and later the Bible, as cudgels to accuse Barton, who is United Methodist, of being a bad Christian.

"You will know that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has expressed some very real criticism of this targeting of the poor and the refusal to raise taxes on the super-rich," Bashir complained before turning to attack Barton by ripping a psalm out of context:

How do you square your approach to the words of Psalm 146, where the psalmist writes this:

"He gives food to the hungry, the Lord protects the foreigners, he defends orphans and widows." Isn't this the exact opposite of the cuts that are being proposed by Republicans in Congress?

Christians of good conscience can agree to disagree about the size and scope of social welfare programs. The Bible is clearly silent on what measures, if any, government should take to provide social welfare, and it most certainly has nothing to say about funding levels and budget cuts that affect the same. Yet it seems Mr. Bashir is more than comfortable attempting to use the Bible to suggest that Democratic budget priorities receive Jesus's stamp of approval while Republican efforts to trim government spending are worthy of his wrath.

Back to Bashir's commentary, the MSNBC host insisted that, in the closing days of the campaign, Paul Ryan, "in a desperate attempt to play the religion card... accused the president of taking America on a dangerous path that restricts freedom and liberty and Judeo-Christian values."

"But that too didn't wash," Bashir exulted, noting exit polls that showed that white evangelical support for the president went up a few ticks from 2008 to 2012 and that Obama won the Catholic vote.

But either Bashir is ignorant of or is deliberately misrepresenting Ryan's comments, made to the Faith & Freedom Coalition on November 4. Ryan was not attacking the president's faith but rather his policies which infringe religious freedom, according to no less an authority that the Catholic bishops Bashir loves to quote when they're critical of Ryan.

The appeal to religious values voters was the only thing that got him as many votes as he did.

The biggest problem Romney's campaign had was coming to that position with too little, too late. If he had a record as a social conservative to go with his pro business message, he'd have been unbeatable.

(In a fair fight, that is.)

4
posted on 11/09/2012 6:57:06 PM PST
by shibumi
(Cover it with gas and set it on fire.)

The fact that the left has any constituents that can call themselves religious or Christian is proof positive the party if full of self loathing hypocrites looking for any way they can legally loot their neighbors and destroy unwanted offspring.

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